The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
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Generations of superheroes see a changing world differently in bland Netflix adaptation of ‘Jupiter’s Legacy’
A few children are playing outside, pretending to be superheroes. As they run around, a girl yells “laser eyes!” to suggest she has just fired powerful beams from her head. Her target, a boy, says she missed him. She does not like this. She screams, releasing a powerful energy force that reveals she really does have superpowers. It causes a couple of boys to scatter, but her brother stays to confront her.
Unfortunately for her, her action has drawn the attention of her father, who soon drops from the sky — in a superhero suit complete with a cape — to deliver a lecture about how powers must be used for only the right reasons.
These opening moments of the first episode of the new Netflix series “Jupiter’s Legacy” hints at the show’s central push-andpull: when and how to use superhuman powers. A new generation of heroes is becoming increasingly disinterested in living by their parents’ ideals as the supervillains they face have become decidedly more deadly.
We’re not exactly starved
for superhero content these days, but it’s a decent enough premise. Unfortunately, the adaptation of the graphic novels by Mark Millar and Frank Quitely falls fairly flat.
While it doesn’t boast a cast loaded with big names (Josh Duhamel is the lead, playing the aforementioned caped hero) or unbelievable action sequences (they’re fine), “Jupiter’s Legacy” falls down in the writing department. Only occasionally a little edgy and rarely comical, the eight episodes of this debut season are pretty bland, especially when factoring in how slowly the show’s parallel storylines move.
The first episode — written and directed by creator and showrunner Steven S. DeKnight (Starz’ “Spartacus”) — nicely establishes this world, in which Duhamel’s Sheldon Sampson is better known as The Utopian, an incredibly powerful being. Like his wife, Grace (Leslie Bibb), aka Lady Liberty; his brother,
Walter (Ben Daniels), aka Brainwave; and three others, The Utopian has possessed his powers since the 1930s. (Although The Utopian, with his long, gray hair, looks pretty long in the tooth, these people have been gifted with a seriously slow aging process
to go along with supernatural strength, the ability to fly and the like.)
After all these years, The Utopian still believes passionately in a code: No matter what, a hero does not take a life.
On this, he is inflexible. It helps to explain the
strains in his relationships with his now-grown children, Chloe (Elena Kampouris) and Brandon (Andrew Horton). While the latter uses his inherited powers as the hero Paragon and struggles to live up to Dad’s expectations, Chloe has taken a different route, becoming a model and party girl who finds just about everything her father says to be obnoxious.
“I didn’t ask to be your daughter,” she tells him during a particularly unpleasant family dinner, “and I sure as (expletive) didn’t ask for your gifts.”
Meanwhile, The Union — basically this universe’s equivalent of the Justice League or the Avengers — is on shaky ground. Lifetime friend George Hutchence (Matt Lanter), aka Skyfox, parted ways with Sheldon and company a while back, and the new generation supers
is losing faith in the relevance of the group in a country dealing with intense political polarization and supervillains out to kill.
In fact, this first hour of “Jupiter’s Legacy” concludes with a number of heroes taking on powerful villain Blackstar (Tyler Mane) and Paragon facing the decision of whether to use deadly force on him or let him kill those about whom he cares.
As the series moves forward, it spends a lot of time in the past — too much time — showing us the origin of the heroes of The Union. Following the death of his father, Sheldon is haunted by intense visions that convince him he must lead Walter, George and others to a strange, faraway place. He doesn’t know what they mean, but he is driven to follow these visions.